The craziest, random game comes to Xbox One…
I remember hearing about Goat Simulator when it was announced and I laughed at how crazy it looked, but I thought “Hey, it’s for PC…they do crazy things all the time” and didn’t pay it that much attention after, but then I heard it was coming to Xbox 360 and Xbox One and then I thought “Hmm…Maybe it’s worth a look after all” so I jumped head first into Coffee Stain Studios’ “Marmite” of gaming…
First of all, Goat Simulator is broken. As in a completely glitchy, unplayable madness. Controlling the Goat seems simple at first, but when you add mutators that add jetpacks and double jumps to the goat, it becomes even crazier. It’s not clear what you actually the objective of the game is, other than the quests that pop up as you play with things like “get hit by a car” or “scare the locals” usually by ramming them, most of them are fairly easy while ones like walking on your front legs almost seems impossible, at least to me.
Goat Simulator at the moment contains 2 open world areas for you to explore, each with secrets aplenty and as announced this week, will eventually launch with a paid-DLC zombie mode. It is clear that the game started out as a joke and while I always love games that poke fun at themselves, it’s not without sacrifice to the game itself.
I didn’t play the PC version, but the framerate in the Xbox One version is pretty bad, sometimes slowing down to even make a jump. It’s almost as if the hardware can’t cope with it, which is crazy considering the specs and even more so when you actually look at the game, which in fairness is average at the best of times. There’s no real handholding to speak of, you are just thrown into this crazy game and left to your own devices, which is great…but it does lack content and it runs out of steam fast.
The Verdict
Goat Simulator has its moments, but only for a short time and then it loses its appeal. It has a terrible framerate, I realise it’s glitchy by design but some of the bugs are just ridiculous, while I hope the zombie DLC adds some new depth to the gameplay in the future, there’s not enough content here to sustain the madness for long.
